(CNN) — After years of criticism, Republicans are bringing the heat in their longstanding efforts to target former health official Dr. Anthony Fauci.
A Senate committee voted Thursday along party lines to hold him in contempt of Congress after he repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination at a hearing last week. The Justice Department must now decide whether to charge Fauci, which seems quite possible given how politicized the department has become under President Donald Trump.
But targeting Fauci — some six years after the Covid pandemic began — is also a selective exercise for Republicans.
And that’s because many of the offenses he stands accused of could potentially be lodged at the man who ran the first 10 months of the government’s Covid response from the most powerful perch: Trump.
At the hearing last week, Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Rand Paul jumped right into his allegations against Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
“Publicly, Anthony Fauci promoted the theory that the virus arose naturally,” the Kentucky Republican said, “while privately he was well aware of a mountain of evidence suggesting the virus originated in the lab.”
But if saying different things privately and publicly about Covid and failing to heed the evidence you’ve received is such a stark offense, Paul might want to have a gander at Trump’s track record.
Back in September 2020, Bob Woodward reported that Trump had done much the same thing early in the pandemic. CNN’s timeline from back then lays it bare.
Trump told Woodward on February 7, 2020, that Covid was “more deadly than even your strenuous flus.” But later that month, he likened the virus to the flu and even said the flu had a higher fatality rate, adding that “the risk to the American people remains very low.”
Trump went on to acknowledge on March 19 that he had decided to minimize the virus in his public comments.
“I wanted to always play it down,” he said. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”
Woodward’s book also detailed some massive warning signs Trump received from his aides very early on, even as he would go on to repeatedly downplay the virus in public. As early as January 28, Trump’s deputy national security adviser said the virus could be as bad as the influenza pandemic of 1918, which killed as many as 50 million people, Woodward reported.
Last week, Paul was asked on MS NOW whether he was also concerned about these issues with Trump.
He didn’t directly answer the question, instead suggesting Fauci’s bigger offense was overseeing funding of foreign labs that do dangerous research. Paul and others have speculated the US-funded “gain-of-function” research might have contributed to the coronavirus outbreak, though it’s never been proven.
But it’s worth noting that under the first Trump administration in 2017, an Obama-era moratorium on funding gain-of-function research was lifted.
Republicans have criticized Fauci for invoking the Fifth Amendment at his hearing last week, with Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri saying that “no honest person pleads the Fifth.” But Trump in a 2022 civil case also invoked the Fifth hundreds of times.
(Fauci’s invocation of the Fifth is somewhat different, in that he was pardoned by outgoing President Joe Biden in January 2025. But experts told CNN that Fauci still might have had some potential criminal liability outside the bounds of that pardon. Fauci also claimed Paul would try to get him to commit perjury.)
Republicans have also suggested Fauci committed perjury in his prior testimony about gain-of-function research. Trump not only struggles mightily to tell the truth publicly — which Republicans are loath to hold him accountable for — but a federal judge in 2022 found Trump signed legal documents containing voter fraud claims that he knew were false.
Some on the right have sharply criticized Fauci for the creation of Covid vaccines that they contend were dangerous and untested and possibly even more dangerous than Covid (which is false). But of course, that vaccine was created as part of a program, Operation Warp Speed, that was launched by Trump.
And finally, many Republicans have blamed Fauci for overzealous Covid lockdowns. But there was also a time when Trump supported shutting down society. In fact, early in the pandemic, the president criticized Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp for trying to open up too quickly in the spring of 2020.
Not all of these examples are apples-to-apples. Fauci’s duties differed from Trump’s, and there was more of an onus on him to get the science right, given his expertise. He also advocated lockdowns much later into the pandemic than Trump did.
But to the extent the nation’s Covid response went poorly six years ago, it would seem important to ask whether the political folks in charge of running it also had something to do with it.
If the vaccine was so dangerous, for example, it would stand to reason people would be scrutinizing the decisions of Trump and others in his first administration in forging it and getting it approved, besides just Fauci.
And if early Covid guidance is under the microscope, it seems weird to ignore the many contradictions and false and even bizarre statements about the virus (remember the bleach?) coming from Trump at a time when Americans were making life-and-death decisions about what they should do.
But a true, broad, apolitical review of the Covid response apparently just isn’t in the cards.
The-CNN-Wire
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